Obsession

Khalda Yagoob
2018 / 10 / 1

There is something in the sky; it is a huge black mass on a reddish background, seemingly 100 meter over the roof. The border between the black mass and the red around was magnificent and vague. Sophie was too worked up to even pay attention to any view, but this view was magic, or rather a complex magic. When she first glanced at the black mass, she jumped out of her skin; she perceived the mass as a huge object in motion. She thought it was a natural disaster. At that moment she scolded herself; because her geographical knowledge is just a sort of senseless information that doesn’t relate to reality. As a result of this thought, she decided to study natural disasters through videos, instead of trying to picture them and fail.Then she decided to get hold of herself, and forget about it, thinking that if it was something grave, she would of saw her mother outside looking at it. Or if the mother was sleeping, she would have heard the neighborhood teens talking about it. Since, these teens were a bunch of yellers; a person can hear them and understand their discussion point in within a considerable diameter. She uses their yelling as news cast sometimes! Anyway, she found no signal of any collective attention to the mass. She entered her room. At the door of her room she started arguing with the voice of her thinking. She said: “Hey voice, stop it. Do something else. Stop being a damn voice.” then she went absent minded for a little while.She said to herself or to her thinking’s voice: “Stop the unwanted furry”. She reached the bed, and in the joy of lying down, she remembered what was going in her mind before crossing the black mass. It weren’t her torturing daydream of reality’s suppression and stupidity. It was something a bit unusual in her terms. She had just got back home. She was meeting some friends who were out together, to see off Tania. She loves Tania; she had always hated the finales, let alone saying goodbye to Tania and waits a whole year to see her again. She said: “I am not going to see her for a year” These words started a new flow of thinking. She thought the reason of her grieve was not her friend’s departure, it is her religion! A religion that she has yet to discover. She said: “I should study Buddhism or try to have any faith. I need to worship something unreal. Something you just believe. It is there and it is clearly not there. This is clever, this tactic does the trick! You wouldn’t worry about it (referring to her worship object) or long for it!”She had always thought that religious people acquire a kind of religion mode. They can switch it on and forget themselves in a total self-pleasing (referring to worship here), in a play with the sweetest ideas (again referring to worship). Yes, they are lucky”.The religion idea seemed fruitless, so she started reading, watching, learning and a little bit reminiscing her immediate past life. The thing is, at the next morning she sat next to a person she knows in the bus. At that moment, she just wished if she had wings to travel with. She started a deep conversation in the public vehicle. Her acquaintance was truly engaged. All the passengers turned into audience. Sophie thought she did manage this scary encounter anyhow.During the conversation she was saying to herself: “you dummy stop being a dump ass. You hate it when people delve in a talk in a public area, which can carry the sound and put it on others’ ears involuntarily. Hey, stop it”.Her acquaintance was really moved by their conversation and tried to convince Sophie to take one more vehicle together instead of going separate ways. Sophie agreed, scarifying her morning’s pleasant long walk. In the second vehicle, a small talk started between her and the acquaintance and a young male stranger. To her utmost surprise she found that the male stranger has a kind heart and a reasonable character. It was the first stranger she met in the city’s public transport that can be described as such. The irony was that, her acquaintance who was reaching out to Sophie ended up beneath her contempt, when she disagreed with Sophie’s favorite stranger. Then, she arrived at work, and became disturbed by a call from an associate from another job she was obliged to carry out, nothing but a polite request. After it, for no handsome reason, she broke into a fit of apoplexy followed by an embarrassing waterworks. She called her boss requesting to let her take an emergency leave. She failed to justify it, all what she managed to say was:“I need to cry but not in front of the kids!” (Sophie is a non-academic teacher assistant). The boss told her to go to the toilet and wait for her, and then stood her up, which is a bit funny. She hid in an airless toilet for one and a half hour, loathing staying by the sink unit, so some lady would come in, just to be amazed by Sophie’s hell of show. In the toilet, speaking to herself she said: “My career is in the toilet literally and figuratively. You still work two jobs; you aren’t got the energy for such a load of bullshit. One job is below the belt. I am sorry, I know you managed to get in this job which pays well, and then it turned out to be a fiasco. It is your fault; you must take the blame for it even if it wasn’t your fault. You have to take it, because you are just you! And no one else! Ok, you decided to quit the losers’ jobs that you had to take together with the fiasco. But you have to take it one more week to close the deal. Listen, I know you are overdone, and more miserable years are giving you the heads up, but come on, bear up until you manage to get out of this literal toilet!” The boss called her to come out to take her bag, so they could close up. She went out in her walk of shame. She wasn’t convinced with all the excuses she had come up with, and her toilets’ lock up was nothing but a time away, she answered her boss’s consecutive questions saying: “None of my beloved just died and there isn’t a serious cause of my collapse but it won’t happen again”The boss said she will give her the free helpline number of the institution and advised her to see a psychiatrist Five hours later:She collected herself completely after five hours. She started smiling and lightening up when she found out that she had forgotten about the black mass and kept it out of her system for about seventeen hours. (She saw the black mass seventeen hours earlier)Sophie intended to cheer up the poor person in her by saying: “Look! You managed to overlook a literal creepy black mass in the horizon, which seemed just above you by inches.” Then, after a pause of contemplation she added up:“Whatever the black mass was, you won against the obsession with it”. 22/06/2018Writer: Khalda Yagoob